by Matt Blake
Era of the ULTRAs
Matt Blake
MATTBLAKEAUTHOR.COM
Contents
Bonus Content
Previous The Last Hero Books
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Want More From Matt Blake?
If you want to be notified when Matt Blake’s next novel is released, please sign up to his mailing list.
http://mattblakeauthor.com/newsletter
Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Previous The Last Hero Books
Era of the ULTRAs is the fifth book in The Last Hero series.
If you’d like to read the first three books, visit here:
ULTRA
Rise of the ULTRAs
Battle of the ULTRAs
Revenge of the ULTRAs
1
1970
Michael Williamson watched with nervous anticipation as his beautiful creation finally came to life.
It was a Saturday night. He knew what normal forty-year-old men did on Saturday nights. They were at home with their families. Maybe they’d take their wives out to a nice romantic dinner, or perhaps they’d spend time watching a cheesy movie with their children. Saturday nights weren’t a time for working. They were a time for leisure.
For Michael Williamson, what he was doing right now was leisure, in a sense.
Just not the conventional kind.
Outside, he knew it was cold and frosty. He knew there’d probably be a mass of snow waiting on the bonnet of his Ford Escort. Good job his car was white. Michael loved his Ford Escort, though. Everyone had one. He’d always struggled fitting in when he was younger, and in all honesty, well into his adult life that struggle had continued.
But now he had his Ford Escort, he was just one of the crowd. He was normal.
As long as nobody heard him singing along to pop radio while he was in there. His voice would be enough to ruin that idea of normality for anyone.
In front of him was a massive sheet of glass. The glass itself was expensive. More expensive than he could afford to put in his home, that was for sure. Totally destruction-proof, apparently. Michael couldn’t believe there was such a thing. Glass was glass. Hit it with enough force, and it was bound to shatter at some stage, right?
But he didn’t want to risk hitting it. He knew what was behind it. The power of his creation. His idea.
Project Beta.
He looked up at the man propped above the ground. His arms were wrapped in metal, as were his ankles. His eyes were sealed shut. He was completely naked, but the metal conveniently covered him in the sensitive places, which relieved Michael ’cause he didn’t want to be looking at any naked man today.
Not that he even saw Project Beta as a man anymore.
Project Beta was something new entirely.
He listened to the gentle hum of this massive underground facility, which could’ve been anywhere in the world. It was relaxing, really. Way more relaxing than those tapes Moira used to listen to. He wondered if she still listened to those now he’d left her. He wondered whether he was the person who stressed her out all along. If he was the reason she always seemed so down in the dumps.
No. He couldn’t believe that. They’d had a good thing, while it lasted.
Just his work became too important. Way too important.
It wasn’t her. It was him.
He had bigger concerns.
Like creating the most important self-defense weapon in American history.
Whenever he considered the consequences and the reality of what he was doing, he couldn’t help but taste vomit and feel his skin crawl. He was just a normal kid twenty-five years ago. A normal kid living in a world where the war had just ended. Only he went to sleep worrying every night about what the world would become if war arrived again. He’d seen what’d happened, behind the scenes, once he got into the government. He’d seen the arms races between the superpowers. He’d seen guns, then nukes, then… then other stuff. Experimental stuff.
And he was going to be at the forefront of that final experiment.
The last form of true defense.
A defense that nobody would mess with. Nobody.
He looked up at Project Beta, eyes closed, brown hair dangling down the front of his face, and for a moment he saw the man.
And then that vision disappeared when he heard the door to the left slide open.
He turned around, startled.
When he saw who was walking toward him, his stomach turned.
Samantha Harvey was tall, blonde, and gorgeous. She had legs to die for and a smile that could end wars. But Samantha Harvey was no dummy. Samantha Harvey was tough. And she could use that smile to get what she wanted.
The way she was smiling at Michael right now, making his heart melt… yeah. Michael was pretty darned sure Samantha Harvey wanted something.
“Michael,” she said. She glanced up at Project Beta, barely acknowledging its presence. “I hear the project is going well.”
“Very well,” Michael said, eager for any excuse to gush over his creation. “Vitals are good. And Project Beta seems really responsive to the serum.”
“The serum?”
Michael did his best to contain his groan. That was the problem with pen-pushers like Samantha. They were intelligent, sure, but they didn’t really understand the intricacies of the operation. They didn’t get the significance of what was being created right here in this lab. “The serum based on our discoveries. The ones that we’ve been testing on prisoners for—”
“Right, of course, the prisoners.” Her interruption was jarring and irritating. She looked down at a piece of paper, studying it closely like there was something lengthy and detailed written on there. Then she lowered it, looked at Michael and smiled. “We need to talk about a failsafe.”
Michael felt his skin crawl. The “F” word. The word he’d been trying to avoid, all this time. “Respectfully, I’ve weighed up the pros and cons of a failsafe—”
“If this… this thing you’re creating does work, then theoretically it should be powerful. A kind of powerful we don’t want to risk crossing.”
“We won’t have to cross it because it’ll be working for us.”
“And if it doesn’t? If it goes rogue?”
“Then it goes rogue. The chances are highly unlikely. It’s just as likely that if we create a failsafe, that failsafe gets into enemy hands and they use it to threaten us.”
Samantha kept on beaming that smil
e at Michael. Her big blue eyes flickered. “There’s no negotiating. We need to develop a failsafe or the entire project comes down.”
Michael felt a wave of sickness hit him with Samantha’s latest threat. Because that’s what it was, no disguising it. It was a threat, pure and simple, designed to put the frighteners on him. “That’s a pretty radical step to take.”
“As is creating a weapon without any kind of off switch. It’s just the responsible thing to do, Michael. And you’re going to do it.”
“And if I don’t?”
For the first time in their exchange, Samantha’s smile faltered. Her stare intensified. Then within a flash, it was back to normal again. “You will. You know we have your best interests at heart. If you comply.”
She nodded at Michael, and she walked away, her heels clicking against the hard floor of the lab.
Michael stood in the silence. He listened to the gentle humming, feeling relaxation seeping into his tense body all over again. He looked up at Project Beta. He didn’t want to create a failsafe. ’Cause a failsafe meant that the second his beautiful creations were born, already they were prisoners to humanity.
Michael didn’t want them to be prisoners to humanity.
He wanted them to be something else entirely.
A new race.
A new breed.
A new species.
Heroes.
He sighed and walked over to the door. He put his finger on the light switch, not wanting to flick it off, not wanting to go away from this place.
But he had an idea.
He had a plan.
He would create a failsafe.
But he’d create something else, too.
And then he’d see how Samantha liked it.
He smiled, took a deep breath, and flicked the switch.
A year later, Michael finished constructing his failsafe.
Forty years later, and over fifteen years since the ULTRAs became public knowledge… a glint of sunlight bounced against a perfectly shiny metal object that’d been buried in the earth for many, many years.
Until now.
2
So, sure, I’d had a few damn good reasons to be anxious over the past couple years of my life.
But for some reason, the nervous anticipation of my eighteenth birthday topped it all.
The afternoon sun shone down intensely on Staten Island. It was the end of summer, that time of year where all the tourists start flocking in their droves because they are convinced that “tourist season” is over, only to realize that they in themselves are a tourist season. Yeah. You know the type.
That said, they’d picked a pretty good month to head over to New York this year. August had been freakishly cloudy by NY standards. It was the first of September, and if the rest of the month followed in this fashion, it was gonna be a treat.
If only I could get out of celebrating my birthday.
I squinted down the street at my home. It was just up on the left. My street was quiet, fortunately. Most of Staten Island was, in truth. You got the occasional day-trippers who took the free ferry from Manhattan, but they mostly disappeared again almost immediately. Not exactly a ton of things here to stay for. All of the fun was across the water.
I listened to the warm breeze carry a plastic Coca-Cola bottle across the sidewalk and realized I was thirsty. Hopefully, I’d be able to just get into my home and have as much drink as I wanted in peace. I’d gone out early to Manhattan. Just a day trip by myself. I took a lot of day trips by myself these days. Wasn’t a lot else I could do now I was not only powerless in the eyes of the world, but not at school or college either. The summer vacation was coming to a close, marking two years since… well, two years since my life changed for the first major time. A lot had happened since. Hell, the world had almost caved in on itself a couple times.
But those days were gone, now. They were just memories, and I was just a relic. A barely recognizable relic that people occasionally nodded and smiled at in the streets. Sometimes people asked me for a selfie, and whether I really was all out of powers, to which my response was always the same.
I’d taken early retirement. Involuntarily.
Some people laughed.
Most people frowned, perhaps baffled that I wasn’t as smooth as the archetypal superhero should be.
I guess one thing ULTRAdom couldn’t prepare you for were the social skills to carry with you in the real world.
I got closer to my house, my body tensing. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Dad had organized something super embarrassing for my eighteenth birthday, especially after all the whispering and grinning he’d exchanged with Damon, Avi, Ellicia, and Cassie.
Oh, Damon. Yeah, I still saw Damon. He was still my best friend. Let’s just address that right away. He screwed up. He… he got involved in something he shouldn’t have and ended up absorbing a load of powers. He blamed himself for Daniel Septer—Nycto’s—death.
But even his powers had faded now. He hadn’t had long to play with them.
I wasn’t sure how they’d gone. Wasn’t sure how he’d just lost them. I’d heard a few more talks of powers just disappearing, so perhaps it wasn’t too absurd to assume that some powers had a kind of expiry date on them. Annoying, sure. But just a part of this mad world we lived in now. People always used to say what a mad world it was back in the old days. If only they’d stuck around to witness the ginormous freak show that was the twenty-first century.
I reached into my pocket for my keys when I heard footsteps just outside my home.
When I looked around, I saw three kids. They were all younger than me, probably fourteen, fifteen. One of them was chubby, larger than life with noodly brown hair. On the other side, a lanky Asian guy. And at the front of the group, a short ginger dude, who was anything but a “dude” but let’s be kind okay?
They stood there and stared at me for a few seconds. Ginger blushed a little, kept glancing up and down from the sidewalk.
“You guys okay?” I asked.
“Are you him?”
“Hmm?”
“Are you… are you really Glacies?”
I felt my face start to burn. My stomach sank. Fans. Just fans. Unthinking, I reached into my pocket for my pen. “I used to be Glacies. But—”
“We heard you used to get bullied,” the big guy said. “At school. Any… any tips?”
I looked at these kids, and I felt pity for them. They weren’t so different from how I used to be. In another life, this could’ve been me, Damon and Avi.
I cleared my throat and started signing the comic that the lanky guy held out. “Just be yourselves. No matter what. Don’t change for anyone.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Huh?”
“You found abilities. Easy for you to say when you changed more than any of us.”
I sensed some animosity in the ginger guy’s voice, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. So I handed him back his comic, smiled and turned away. To be honest, I didn’t like encounters like this. I felt guilty. Guilty that I couldn’t be the hero these people wanted me to be anymore.
And why not?
Ironically, because it was better that they saw me for what I once was. Not for who I was now.
It was better that my heroics were in the past so that the pressure and expectation weren’t on for the future.
I shuffled over to my front door and unlocked it.
When I opened it, I was met by a beautiful sound. Silence.
I walked down the hallway, hearing my footsteps echo against the fresh wood that Dad recently put down. He fit furniture now. That’s why I hadn’t seen him already today. He started work real early and finished real late. I kind of liked the space of the place to myself.
I walked toward the kitchen, opened the door, bracing myself for some kind of grand welcome.
There was no one home.
“Not even a card?” I muttered. I didn’t mean to be disappointed. I didn’t want a fuss. But surely ev
eryone hadn’t just forgotten me, right? Surely everyone hadn’t…
I saw the photograph of Mom on the mantelpiece. The one where she was cuddling Auntie Stef’s Labrador, that infectious smile on her face. The smile before she thought Cassie was lost.
I wanted Mom to be here. Of anyone, I wanted to celebrate my birthday with Mom. Sad, I know, but that was the truth. She was my real best friend. She was my—
I heard footsteps behind.
When I turned around, I heard the voices before I registered who they belonged to.
“Surprise!”
I saw the smiling faces of the people I knew, heard the party poppers, but my gut reaction made something spark across my hands. Something cold stretched across my palms, seeped up my forearms.
Damon.
Avi.
Ellicia.
Cassie.
Dad.
I saw their laughter, saw their smiles, and I composed myself.
I made the ice go away and tried to look happy.
But as they surrounded me, hugged me, wished me a happy birthday, I kept my palms covered completely.
I’d almost sparked my powers and given them away.
I couldn’t give them away.
Because I had to keep everyone believing that I didn’t have powers anymore.
I had to keep my abilities a secret because I wanted to live a normal life.
I had to keep them secret because I didn’t want to be a hero anymore.
3
It turned out Dad didn’t have anything too zany planned. Just a meal for family and friends at Pazza Notte over in Manhattan. I liked the place. They did delicious pizza. So I couldn’t exactly complain.
Not until Cassie leaned over when I was halfway through my tiramisu and gave me a very silent lecture about responsibility, something she seemed to be making a hobby of lately.
“They’re going to find out eventually,” were her words. And as she spoke them into my ear, I knew exactly what she meant right away. See, I might be able to keep my powers from the world; I might be able to keep them from my friends. I might even be able to keep them from my dad, and from my girlfriend.
